


plait, perpetuem

by chuchisushi



Series: bind up your brittle battalion; we march again to war [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Team as Family, making shit up about the guardians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-20 04:33:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9475865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuchisushi/pseuds/chuchisushi
Summary: Once, he had rung with the sound of raised voices, bled to the quick with belief.Or: Chirrut cuts Baze's hair after Scarif.





	

**Author's Note:**

> written for [this kmeme prompt](http://rogueonekink.dreamwidth.org/1084.html?thread=381756#cmt381756)! sorry OP; it's a bit on the short side this time...
> 
> thanks as always go to [my brother](http://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus) for emerging from his own kmeme pit to beta

They do not survive unscarred.

How could they? How could they, when it was so miraculous that they’d survived at all?

It is a mercy that the core of Rouge One is allowed to recover together, even if it means they are crammed together in one too-small room of the medbay. Bodhi, he, and Baze sustained burns, damage from shrapnel and the blast wave from their respective explosions, and Chirrut himself has a gun wound to the gut to recover from (as well as the few fractures from Baze’s dead weight flung atop him in desperation. He’d scold the other for it, forgetting their training so, if the action hadn’t meant his life.) Bodhi is the worst burnt of they three, but his hands will recover (even if it had meant the exposure of other parts of his body to the heat in exchange. Chirrut can _feel_ how little Bodhi cares about the damage. He  _will_ fly again, and the knowledge fills his recovery with a determination that houses a core of durasteel.) Chirrut and Baze are perhaps equally hurt, paired even in this, but Baze, having been Chirrut’s shield…

“It will grow back,” Chirrut tells him, voice pitched soft enough to not be overheard, his words covered by the hiss and click of medical machines, their soft beeping. It is just late enough in the night to be early in the morning, and Chirrut knows even Jyn (wary, watching Jyn, who had run for so long and who is finally learning what _security_ and _home_ could mean) has succumbed to the aches and pains of her healing. He cards fingers once more through the length of Baze’s unbound hair, frowns a little into the darkness at the sensation of frizzled ends. Next to him, pressed against him, the bulk of Baze expands and then deflates on a careful sigh.

“I know,” he rumbles in return, doesn’t flinch even when Chirrut’s searching fingers find the edges of the bandage taped onto the side of his skull and the short, stubbly fuzz surrounding it, though he grunts, once, in false irritation. Chirrut splays one hand against the front of Baze’s chest as though to soothe him in apology for it, but both he and Baze know that the motion is as much for his benefit as it is Baze’s. Chirrut can still feel the phantom sensation of the hard plastic of Baze’s oxygen mask underneath his fingertips. The snatches of memory from their flight (the dragging, wet texture of Baze’s breaths as Chirrut had slipped in and out of consciousness) still catch him unaware. Baze doesn’t need help to breathe anymore, and Chirrut is glad, so glad of it, but Baze is still slower to recover than he. He had left parts of their faith, training, behind when the Empire had invaded, not held all their practices close as Chirrut yet did, and Chirrut pours himself into recovery in response because even he is not unaffected by the gentle paranoia of having lived a dangerous life for so long: he is aware – so aware – of how vulnerable they are. He wants to be back upon his feet as soon as he may. Baze grunts and covers the hand on his chest with his own.

“It needs to be cut,” Baze says. His words are all rough pragmatism, but it’s enough to make Chirrut’s chest twinge. He remembers how Baze had been mocked as a rising initiate for allowing himself to vainly cultivate a target, for giving his opponents another potential edge. Baze had proven those voices wrong again and again in the ring, made the others eat their words, and worn red ribbons woven into his braids in defiance as he’d gained honor after honor. Yet all the respect in the world hadn’t stopped Chirrut from yanking on them if he gained the opening in their matches (he still fought dirty even after all these years, some habits never broken), but later, later…

Chirrut cards his hands through Baze’s damaged hair and swallows against the tension that closes his throat. Baze allows it, even goes so far as to tip his head into the touch, and Chirrut buries his face against his husband’s shoulder because he knows how upset Baze must truly be to ask so for comfort. Loss clings to both of them, to Jyn and Cassian and Bodhi, to the sterile-smelling medward sheets and the crinkling pillows and the echoing steps in the long hallway outside. It is not unfamiliar to them, to Baze and he, but now – now…

Baze covers the side of Chirrut’s head, yet-unerring despite the dark, and Chirrut exhales as his world becomes the pulse-roar of a familiar heartbeat clasped against his ear. Chirrut has never seen the sea, but Baze had described the white noise of its waves so with his hands cradling his skull, the throb of an entirety enclosed in the cup of two callused palms.

He closes his eyes.

 

When Chirrut is well enough to stand and Baze strong enough to be ferried about in a gravchair, Chirrut charms a nurse into loaning him a pair of scissors. He shuffles Baze outside after he makes his morning rounds (perching on the edge of Bodhi’s bed to fuss over the pilot’s hair as well; touching Cassian on the ankle, the arm, the temple; clasping Jyn’s hand in his own for the span of a breath), Baze grunting directions as they pick their slow way out of the medward and across one of the flight decks, back into the world. Baze has them stop near the edge of one of the platforms, and Chirrut takes in a breath that comes to him green and humid, sticky-lush. The jungle thrums all about him to the part of him that listens to the Force, vibrantly alive, and Baze lets him have the time to revel in it, patient.

Chirrut cards his fingers through unbound hair. It has been long enough now that he could almost describe it by touch alone, having spent these long days and nights of recovery with his hands tangled in Baze’s locks. Chirrut could swear his fingerprints smell like char and bacta for it. He starts to cut; Baze bows his head.

Chirrut prunes the shriveled ends, the matted tangles, the knots that cannot be picked out that catch on his knuckles. Baze does not tell Chirrut what he’s looking at, but soon, between, around the gritty snip of scissors, come the words, “The Force is with me; I am one with the Force.”

Chirrut falters. His hands hesitate. Baze reaches up and back to him, touches gently at the soft skin on the inside of Chirrut’s left wrist.

“You don’t need,” Baze says, “to speak it so fast anymore. Two’s enough for the litany and the answer, to fill the space.”

Chirrut breathes out, shaky. He swallows. “I am,” he says, and the words are unfamiliar, strange things now on his tongue at this pace, “one with the Force. The Force is with me.” His voice trembles. Baze’s fingers wrap about his wrist. “I am one with the Force; the Force is with me,” he repeats, and on the third litany, Baze’s rumble slides in, asynchronous and stubborn, with: “The Force is with me; I am one with the Force.”

Chirrut almost trips over his half, because it has been so _long_ , so long since he has heard this, but he speaks and his words and cadence drop instinctively back into memory, into hours of long habit wellworn with a chorus of voices raised in meditation, mental training, filling the stone rooms and halls of the Temple with the shapeless susurrus of faith. His words alone had never been enough, after the Empire. Had never come close to filling in the gaps necessitated by his own breath and rhythm; he had sped up over the years in an unconscious, soft desperation, chasing after a fading memory of more peaceful days, when the Guardians would make the walls and kyber crystals ring from the volume of their unified, paired words. It has been so _long_ ; Chirrut speaks, and he hears no space in their belief, Baze chanting with him lockstep, offbeat, just enough for the faith to roll eternal like it had so many years ago. Chirrut’s eyes well with saltwater like the sea as he cuts Baze’s hair, and he makes no effort to stem it, lets them overflow. Baze’s grip has moved to Chirrut’s forearm, squeezing tight enough to bruise, he just as overcome in his quiet way. Neither of their voices falter.

Chirrut clears out damage. Tidies the edges of the area the medics had shorn to get at Baze’s scalp, shaping the line of fuzz more fashionably deliberate. Clumps and strands of Baze’s hair float down and away, off the edge of the platform. When he’s satisfied, he tucks the scissors into a pocket of the loaned clothes he’s wearing. Buries his fingers against Baze’s scalp and runs them through, once, before he starts to braid. He works in as much of Baze’s hair as he can manage, pulling it away from the other’s face. Yavin 4 is so unlike cold Jedha that he thinks Baze will appreciate it. Maybe.

He ties off each braid with bits and bobs he’d pilfered from their medbay room, off of the nurses and the others after they’d awoke. It, probably, looks even worse than it did, before Scarif, before Eadu, before Chirrut had called out to the moving sliver of kybersong he’d heard in a crowded street, feeling the Force surge in his bones. Baze reaches down to touch the ends. His voice slips into silence, and Chirrut lets his go still as well.

“As short as it was when I was initiated,” is what Baze says, eventually, and there is a wealth of buried grief in those simple words, enough that Chirrut chokes out a noise and rounds the grounded gravchair to kneel before his beloved, both hands reaching out blind. Baze takes them immediately, no hesitation in his movements, and Chirrut clasps them close and brings both to his lips to press kisses to Baze’s rough knuckles.

“We survived,” he says into Baze’s skin. “We remain. We remember.” He lets Baze pull him up into a proper kiss, standing between his husband’s spread knees. He runs his fingers over Baze’s hair, brushes the pads of them over his braids. “Oh, Baze – it will grow back. I’ll comb it all out for you once more, and I’ll braid it again, as it was before. As it was, then,” Chirrut promises, foolishly, helplessly, lost. Neither of them know where they will be or how they will live days, weeks, months from now, if the Empire will have destroyed them or if the Alliance will still prevail. Chirrut promises despite it, heartbroken, and Baze calls him a fool – but he pulls Chirrut even closer to press his face against the other’s belly, nose against cloth, wounds, bacta, and scars.

“It will grow back,” Baze states, muffled. And then, “I will hold you to that.”

And Chirrut wraps arms around him, glad shelter, and murmurs, “Yes. Yes. I know,” in return.


End file.
